


What a Piece of Work is a Man

by lanyon



Category: Withnail & I (1986)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 02:49:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2796890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I don’t regret that I never played the Dane. </p>
<p>I always suspected there was more of the Guildenstern and/or Rosencrantz in me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What a Piece of Work is a Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosedamask](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to **damask_and_dark**. This is less a fix-it and more a fumble-to-fix-it. I hope you enjoy and thanks for the great prompt.  
>  Thanks to D for the read through. ♥

Have you ever wondered what happened to Horatio after Hamlet departed, with a court full of corpses and a promise that he would live? 

Years before everything with Withnail, I had understudied for Hamlet so far off the West End that it was, technically, no longer in London. I did play a part in the play, long after I left Withnail. I had aged enough to be Claudius and, by then, Withnail and I were friends again. 

=

I walked away from Withnail, leaving him to recite Shakespeare and drink fine wine in the park. Adrift, I had little by way of pride and less by way of money. I moved into a dingy terraced house near Stockwell, where the sink was sadly empty of sentient teabags and the communal living area was sadly occupied by committed teetotallers. 

That first night, rats climbed the walls. 

The second morning, I went to rehearsal. It was a readthrough and nothing more dramatic than that. We sat around old school-desks, with names carved into their lids [ _BAZ WOS ERE_ , _REGGIE XII.MCMLIII_ ] and this was it. This was bloody it. I was an actor again and I didn’t bloody care if I was second-rate or third-rate. I didn’t bloody care that it wasn’t Shakespeare because I was the bloody lead. I chain-smoked through the whole thing and grinned like a bloody idiot at anyone who caught my eye. I had palpitations and the shakes and it was bloody marvellous. My director said I brought energy to the role. 

Years before, both Withnail and I swore off drink, till the shakes started. Those bloody shakes. I couldn’t light a cigarette with enough confidence not to set my face alight. I never did that again, giving up booze. Not till now, and now, everything was bloody marvellous. 

A note: my optimism didn’t last. It didn’t even last the day. Optimism has never been a Marwood trait. It sits uneasily on our shoulders. Mine is a family of mediocre soldiers and unremarkable scholars. Our careers invariably peak in secondary school and it’s a melancholy trudge downhill from there. 

I wondered about Withnail. I wondered if he and Danny had killed each other yet, or if they had died in an ill-advised drug consumption competition. 

I had palpitations and the shakes and I knew the cure. 

A note: moving across the Thames requires one to find a new local, complete with a new barman and new squinting regulars and a new homophobic Irishman. 

I wondered about Withnail. 

=

Withnail and I met at an audition. Long before I was running down angry bulls, we met at an audition and we both lost out to a bloke who did not go to Harrow.

We were fresh-faced and thought that A-levels were the height of achievement and I had no idea that Withnail was an inveterate liar. 

“I know you,” he said.

“No,” I said. 

“Yes,” he said, waggling a finger at me. “I know you. You played rugger, I’m sure of it.”

I didn’t. I was too small and overly scholarly, even then.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Yes, you did,” he said. “Flyhalf, in sixty-two.”

“No,” I said, convinced now that he was quite mad. “Cricket. Wicketkeeper, in sixty-one.” 

“Yes,” said Withnail, amiably. “That’s what I thought.”

=

Nineteen-seventy dawned, uninterestingly. I wondered about Withnail.

“What’s your new housemate like?” 

“He’s a ponce. An actor. Bad break-up, I think. You know how it is.” 

A note: eavesdropping is a dishonest occupation to gain an honest opinion. Two wrongs, and all of that.

“He pays his share and that’s all I care about.” 

=

I fumbled coins into the meter., my daily hangover rendering me fumbling and clumsy. I was perturbed by the ongoing cleanliness of the kitchen and the bathroom door that locked. My hair was growing again. I preferred it short.

I wondered about Withnail. It turned out that it was exceedingly difficult to walk away from someone who had carved a place in one’s innards. 

A note: whenever I wondered about Withnail, of course, it meant that I missed him. I knew that I would. I even told him so, that it would be so, that I would miss him. 

I wondered how he would do without me. He was not nearly as helpless as he might have pretended, at times, though his theatrics no longer translated to the stage. 

It was the height of arrogance, of course, to think that he would wither like an untended flower. He was Withnail, after all. 

=

After my starring role on stage came a brief recurrent part in a well-known television soap opera that shall remain nameless but it was one that necessitated a move to the grim north. Suffice to say it was no better than Monty’s cottage in the Lake District. If anything, it was a higher density of alarming individuals whose thin veneer of civility hid something very dark indeed, necessitating a call to Danny, who put me in touch with an associate of his. 

My employment with the television company ended rather abruptly, with my southern character being sent to prison for crimes unknown.

“You’re that poofter off the telly,” said a fellow passenger on the train to London. The Jag, by then, had expired and public transport was my punishment. 

“Yes,” I said. It was easier than arguing. “Why not?”

I used the tiny toilet at the end of the carriage, rat-a-tatting from side to side, as I bleakly regarded my red-rimmed eyes. I swallowed the last of the pills that Danny’s associate provided and the train journey became, at once, more bearable. 

I wondered-

=

It was chance, after all. I never went back to The Mother Black Cap, though I’m sure she would have welcomed me with open arms and uncomfortable slander.

It was chance, waiting outside a theatre to audition, that led me to buy _The Daily Mail_. Not strictly to my tastes but the role was for a Tory front-bencher and if I could not simply act the part, I could at least research it.

That was when I saw it. An obituary for Montague Withnail, late of West House, survived by a nephew. 

I auditioned, though my heart wasn’t in it, and neither was my mind. The casting director look at me blandly, through thick-rimmed glasses and a particularly exuberant ginger moustache. “We’ll call your agent,” he said. 

=

I went to Monty’s funeral, in my finest suit. I think the old boy would have appreciated it. I do not know whom I expected to attend but the turnout was pitiful. There were the local ol dears from the parish and a handful of men who had forgotten they were no longer boys.

Withnail looked wide-eyed and confused. 

I shook his hand, at the end, precise and proper, and he drew me into a clasping hug. He stank of expensive wine and cigarette smoke. “He left me the bloody cat,” he said, as though we were picking up a conversation of an hour ago. 

“As long as he left you the bloody house, too,” I said. 

The vicar looked scandalised. 

“ _And_ the bloody wine cellar.” Withnail did not relinquish his grip on my arm. It was all too natural to fall into step with him. 

“Good old Uncle Monty,” I said. 

“Dust to dust,” intoned the vicar, lugubriously. “Looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come.”

We walked away from the cemetery, together, and it started to rain. 

“Welcome home,” said Withnail, as he heaved open the door of West House. “Beware of the cat.”

=

I don’t regret that I never played the Dane. 

I always suspected there was more of the Guildenstern and/or Rosencrantz in me.


End file.
